I just wanted to exchange my theater tickets today.

So I called the Pittsburgh Public Theater, and had that standard box office conversation (”When can you get me good alternate tickets, how about this date, try that one.”) And oh, by the way, I said to him, where is the seating chart on your new site?

The box office guy pointed it out to me over the phone, and proudly indicated that I could see any seat’s view on the website. (In fact, you can play along at home.) “Put in your row and seat number,” he instructed, and that one was easy, I could see the boxes right there, begging me to fill them in. Immediately, the seat I was going to get lit up. “But wait,” I complained, “I thought I would be able to see the view from that seat!” Well, in fact, the box office guy explained, you can see the view. Just roll your mouse over your seat.

Now that I look at it again, I do see the little type with the instructions. But — where you sit in a theater is incredibly important. My best friend, a theater addict, taught me that seating is everything. For the person who really cares where she sits (and that is me, and a lot of people like me), this is a great opportunity to make the sale. A fabulous feature. Not one to hide with little type.

When you buy shoes online, you think that there might be an opportunity to see them from various angles. So, it might be somewhat intuitive to click on the shoe. But when you buy tickets online, do you expect to be able to see the view? No. The feature is so cool and so new - this site needs to make a much bigger deal of it.

OK, go ahead, tell me about the theaters around the world that are already doing this.

I would add, maybe they have tested it and found that I am wrong. But given that I can’t find any WA, I pretty much doubt that they have tested anything. Pretty website, though.

Don’t you ever wonder about the computations of that little calculator that Google gives you to figure out the length of a multivariate test?

I don’t have any insider knowledge. But I have studied it enough to understand certain issues (and many thanks to Dylan Lewis of the Web Analytics Wiki for confirming my suspicions wrt how it should work.) Specifically, you should need more data to “prove the same thing” if your control has a higher conversion rate, up to a conversion rate of 50%.

So let’s start: why does the GWO calculator ask you to input the conversion rate of your current page? Well, here’s why they care. If you hold everything else the same and tell the calculator that your current conversion rate is 4% instead of 3%, it will want a larger sample (translation: more pageviews, or more time to get those more pageviews) in order to get the statistical significance it needs.

So look at these two examples. All the variables are the same (sort of — I promise I will explain.) However, in the examples below, one conversion rate was 3% and the other is 4%. Notice, also (here is the explanation just promised) that I changed the expected increase in conversion rate. With the 4% test, I have it expected to increase by 25% (so that I will get a one point lift in my conversion — after all, .25*4=1) And with the 3% test, it’s expected to increase by 33.33% (because 3% times .33333 is also a one point lift):

So when the current conversion rate is higher, and you are looking for the same absolute expected improvement, the test takes longer, so that you can get more pageviews - i.e. get a greater sample size.

Why?

Why do we need more data to prove improvement with a highly-converting page than with a poorly converting page? Here, I will use a more extreme example: an absolute increase of one point is pretty low when you are looking at a page that converts at 25%. So we need lots of data to prove that a test will do better than the 25%. But a one point increase — that a whopping increase if your control page converts at 4% right now. So we can prove that our new test is better than our old control with just a little bit of data in that situation.

Here’s the really interesting part: when your control has a conversion rate of 50%, you need the most pageviews, i.e. time to get those pageviews. As you keep going beyond 50%, the time to run your tests starts to decrease. When you get to a conversion rate of 75% for your control, the time it takes for the test should mirror the time it takes at a control conversion rate of 25%. (It’s not perfectly exact for mathematical reasons that are too boring to go into here.) But check it out:

(notice that 25* 10% is a 2.5 point lift, and 75* 3.33333 is a 2.5 lift in conversion rate, also.)

Why?

Why does it all turn around at 50%? And I want to try to explain this without using ps and qs and little hats, since I’m not a statistician. So I won’t use fancy equations. Just simple ones.

All these equations that are behind all these kinds of calculators, they include two events: heads or tails. Conversions or non-conversions. They never say (to the extent that they talk), “Conversion is good.” Only people think that conversion is good and non-conversion is bad. (Those equations also include other stuff, but we don’t have to go there.) In fact, you have to have five conversions and five non-conversions for a combination to show up in the graphical area of the website optimizer (the area where the bars are green and grey and red.)

So when you start playing with conversion times non-conversion, you find out that they multiply out to the largest amount when they are both 50%. Right? .5*.5= .25 but if you now use a little 2% conversion rate instead, you have .02*.98 = .0196. That’s way lower than .25 (and remember — this is not sample size, but is one of the important parts of the sample size equation.)

My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Petrowski, insisted that I learn all those math laws, and one of them was about “commutativity” — it doesn’t matter what the order is in multiplication, you still get the same answer, she lectured. So we can swap those numbers and say that the conversion rate is 98%, leaving the non-conversion rate to be 2%, and the product is still .0196.

So whether you have a 98% conversion rate or a 2% conversion rate — your sample size is going to be the same. (Remember that there is a lot of other junk that goes into the equations, but this basic principle should hold, even though I don’t have access to the innards of the calculator.) And from all this gobbledygook we learn:

• To prove that a test is 1% better than the control, you need more pageviews if the control has a high conversion rate than you would if the control had a low conversion rate.
• However, once the control has a conversion rate over 50%, you start needing fewer pageviews.
• This is a hard topic. If you didn’t understand, please comment and I will do my best.

Whew. This post took me at least two months to write. Many thanks toDylan, again; to Wendi Malley; to Tom Leung (whom I have driven crazy on this topic); and to EV, the GWO engineer who must be sorry he ever gave me his email address.

Everyone who thinks that change in conversion rate should be viewed as a PERCENT and not as an absolute lift in conversion is welcome to flame in the comments.

Robbin

When I was in Hawaii (I bet you didn’t expect me to start that way), I cut my foot on the coral reef, my first day there. This was because Justin Cutroni insisted that I go visit the North Shore of Oahu. So instead of running around, I spent a week sitting under the palm trees and read Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. But I had all these questions, and the author, Avinash Kaushik, answered them for me! Here is the fourth part of this incredibly detailed set of answers to my questions.  There are only three more questions here, but instead of just providing clarification, there are some big new thoughts and resources. You can read my thoughts in boldface and the author’s in quiet type.

Read Part 1
Read Part 2
Read Part 3

Why do you care so much about the customer experience and discount conversion rate so much? (We can say, p. 340, but you address this elsewhere too) The way that I look at it, there are either other conversions (like applying for a job, or getting help on the website), and the analyst is just forgetting to include those conversions. Or, it’s important that the customer have a good experience so that when he is ready to buy, he will (and it is a long term problem, but it is still about conversion rate.) Or, he will tell other people or write about what a good experience he had, and *they* will come and convert, eventually. So it is still a conversion rate problem. Ultimately, it is always about conversion rate. (Go ahead. Tell me that I’m wrong.)

I had written the above answer before I read this question!

Let me first say that I think you and I are defining conversion differently.

No matter what kind of site you have it is extremely likely that people come to your website for a very diverse set of reasons. Even on an ecommerce website people are there to buy, research, read the company’s bio, check order status / inventory, submit a review, bitch about something, look for support, find your address, whatever else is possible on earth.

If you accept that fundamental premise (and if you don’t just do a one question survey on your website and ask the visitors: “why are you visiting our website today”), then you’ll agree that if you want to make everyone on your website happy then focusing just on improving conversion (“sell”) is solving for just a minority of the site traffic. It also means that perhaps you are telling all other visitors to take a hike.

You do want to make money on your ecommerce website, you do want to figure out how to improve the conversion rate (orders/unique visitors). But that can’t possibly be your life’s mission, not even on a ecommerce website.

You need to figure out how to carry all other types of visitors with you and help them complete their tasks.

Ok here is the controversial part: You are a consultant and LunaMetrics is a very good consulting company. You have conversion rate as your middle name. If you get hired then you are probably supposed to simply improve the conversion rate. If you want to get paid, and rehired, then you have to solve that problem, and not care about any other type of visitor. I suspect even if you were of a very generous heart you can’t afford to care about any other type of visitor, you are being paid to sell more. That’s ok for you.

But I hope that companies realize that sell, sell and figure out how to sell more is not a long term strategic choice. They need to identify all the reasons visitors come to their site (“Primary Purpose”) and help them all (improve “Task Completion Rate”).

p. 312. IMO, there is no way to get competitive conversion data outside of panel data. Am I wrong? (Go ahead, you don’t have to be nice.)

You can get it from ComScore (in case you did not mean that by panel data).

As I mention above you can also use the FireClick Index, they even break it out for new and returning visitors! And for the last 12 months!! And for six different industry verticals!!! Compare trends over time with the index and it will give you a great feel for how things are going for you.

You can also sign up for the delightful shop.org ecommerce / conversion report, many people think of that as the bible.

Finally, yesterday I got an email from Stephane Lagrange and I noticed on his blog, http://blog.webtarget.ca, he has referenced the Top 500 Guide published by InternetRetailer.com which also publishes conversion rates for top ecommerce websites. Here are some of the numbers, directly copied from Stephane’s blog:

#1 Amazon.com: 3.52%
#2 Staples.com: 9.62%
#3 Office Depot: 7.10%
#498 Broadspan Commerce LLC: 0.35%
#499 Musicnotes Inc: 3.25%
#500 KneeDraggers.com: 0.99%

Thank you for helping, and of course, for writing your great book. I loved every piece of it, except for the Six Sigma part. (That was way too dry for me, which is a shame, since that’s an area I know almost nothing about.) On page 286, you wrote, “It is amazing what people won’t tell you even in the most open and honest company environments, because they are just trying to be nice.” You clearly didn’t have me in mind when you wrote that line….

You are underestimating the value of what you bring to the table. Under any circumstance I know exactly where you stand and what your opinion is. Sometimes it might hurt to hear the truth, but it is always better to hear the truth. You are honest, direct and willing. It makes for a refreshing change in a world where one is always trying to parse nuances and syllables to understand where the other person stands. I am glad that you have the courage to share your real opinion and you don’t have a hidden agenda (and if you have one then you are doing very well hiding it! ).

Thanks for the opportunity to do this interview, you had great questions and it was fun to answer them.

Did you have questions when you finished Web Analytics: An Hour a Day? I did.

The book was truly amazing. But when I was done, I had written all over it. Sometimes my notes read, “This is awesome, we have to try it.” But sometimes they read, “I don’t understand.” And other times, they read, “I really disagree.”

So I got an interview with the author. It came to nine pages (count ‘em, 123456789), so I am going to reprint it in parts. Avinash, you are truly wonderful for devoting this much time.

So let’s get started. And in my usual “in your face” fashion, I’ll start with a question that most people wouldn’t ask the Guru of WA:

Please allow me a quick interruption. The word Guru is of Hindu (Indian) origin and having grown up in India I have to say that I do not consider myself a Guru. One has to meet an astoundingly high benchmark to get that title and I am very very far away from even the starting point of meeting that benchmark.

For more context on that word here’s the wonderful wikipedia [definition]

In the introduction - why do you write that your book is for everyone? Is it for my mother, who is retired and spends lots of time taking care of my father? Is it for my daughter — the one who can drill down in her Quicken, but refuses to do anything academic? No, of course not. But that’s what customers do. We ask them, “Who is your site for?” and they answer, “Everyone!” So – who is your book for?

You got me.

Perhaps that was overuse of the word everyone.

Here are the specific people / roles that are mentioned in the introduction of the book:

· Mr./Ms. Web Interested

· CEO

· C-level or VP-level or just No-level person

· Marketer

· Sales Person

· Web-Designer

· User Researcher

· Analyst

The introduction describes how the book will be helpful specifically for each role.

As an example, here’s the one for Web Designer: If you are a Web “Designer” then this book will share with you how you don’t have to compromise on the number of ideas you can put on the website to improve the site, that you can have all of your ideas (even the radical ones) go live on the site and measure which one solves the customer (or your company’s) problems most effectively.

 

Question: I love the idea of surveying, continuously. However, it has not worked out well for me or my customers. We figured out how to delete the pop-up blockers, only to find out that customers hated it. And shouldn’t it be “customers first?” Any advice about the best way to *administer* exit surveys?

In my experience surveys that are shown at the right time with the intent of allowing the customer to express their opinion go ok. Typically we cram so much into a survey that only we care about that a customer looks at it, pukes and exits.

If you ask customers “nicely” they want to tell you about their experience.

My advice:

1) Experiment with different invitation types (pop up, pop under, on exit etc) and see what your customers prefer. And you only have to do this a few days each to get a feel for it.

2) Start with small number of questions (remember the “golden questions” post?) and then expand.

3) Put a really large close button. Make it apparent, clearly, that the survey can be closed. In a very subliminal way it works very effectively and actually gets closed less (if you have done #1 and #2 above first!).

From a mindset perspective you want them to share with you what they think rather than do a quick little interrogation with a battery of questions. Fine balance.

While we are on surveys - how do you feel about surveys that force the visitor to answer certain or all of the questions? It is infuriating to me when I answer a BizRate survey for the chance to get a “free” magazine, and they force me to answer questions (so instead, I just lie.) Thoughts?

I skip it.

I also rarely do any other surveys. I often read them to study them from a knowledge / awareness perspective, but I don’t fill surveys.

Here is the thing. I am not the customer and it is irrelevant what I think about surveys.

The first time we did a survey it was 20 questions and I was positive it would bomb, after all who in God’s name has that much time. Turns out that it had a consistent 18% response rate (compared to an internet standard of 1% response rate for surveys).

My lesson was that I should try not to impose my views and opinions and check them in at the door. Because I am not the customer, no matter how much I think I am. It is a tough pill to swallow because we tend to think we are “experts” because we have so much knowledge and data.

Experiment, it is cheap, see what works and what does not, refine and try again.

Why do you have a Trinity? I really see a duality, clickstream data and qualitative data.

It is qualitative (Experience), clickstream (Behavior) and the third prong is Outcomes.

Some people mix clickstream with outcomes. I choose to break it out for two reasons:

1) I want people to outrageously focus on outcomes. It is easy to be hypnotized by all the clickstream data and reports and forget to set goals or measure in a very hard core way outcomes. Yet the thing that drives action is not all your clickstream analysis, it is the tie to outcomes.

2) I want people to think of outcomes more than conversion. I am not big on obsessing about conversion, which will almost always lead to solving for a minority of your site traffic. Outcomes are improved customer satisfaction numbers, increased task completion rates, increased depth of visit over time, problem resolution rates on support websites, better recency trends on non-ecommerce website.

By putting outcomes as a separate part of the Trinity I am trying to emphasize the importance of understanding outcomes, and different types of outcomes beyond just revenue/conversion.

Do you think that makes sense?

 

Notice that I didn’t answer his last question (”Does that make sense?”) — I hope some of you will.

Coming next: Part 2, where I ask Avinash about first and third party cookies, where to put the code on the page when you are torn between conflicting needs, and other really “down in the weeds” Q&A.

Part2   Part 3   Part 4

Robbin

Do you ever abandon a website because you need to know when the product (gift??) will arrive?

If I buy software from your website, I can download it as soon as my credit card is approved. If you have a lead generation site, I’ll be added to your list of leads instantly, and if your salesperson turns around that lead within hours, he has a better chance of closing. But if I’m buying a product from you, why can’t you tell me when it is arriving?

Oh sure, I know. “Your product will arrive in 3-7 business days.” I see it all the time on the web. But if today is Friday, seven business days will include two weekends. Not very precise.

I go to “Contact Us” pages all the time to figure out where the company is shipping from. If it’s coming from Florida, it will be here in three days from the day it’s shipped. Seattle takes a full business week. New York might be here tomorrow.

Now, maybe you are Amazon and you have many warehouses, and the shipping location depends on the arrival location. But you probably aren’t Amazon. It is possible that you drop ship products, also making the problem harder.

But still.

If you can’t tell me when the product will arrive (before I order, that is), maybe you can tell me, “Most orders ship one business day after we receive your order. 95% of our product ships out of our warehouse in Boca Raton, FL.

Or wherever you happen to ship from.

Robbin

I used to devastate guys. Not in the “you should drop dead because I am so beautiful and have no time for you” kind of way (I’m not beautiful), but in the “Let me insult you in front of all your friends so that you feel like two cents” kind of way.

So it should not be surprising that I treated two out of three websites that way recently — it comes so naturally. Lars Johansson sent me a list of European (and mostly Scandanavian) websites, and asked me to evaluate them for conversion best practices. Well, you can read for yourself how I treated two of the websites like guys with overblown egos.

Robbin

How long do you have to run a test to consider it a tie?

You could consider this to be part II of a series, where part I is a post by statistician Wendi Malley. She writes about how many pageviews I need in my sample size before I can call my Google Website Optimizer (GWO) test a tie. You should bear with me even if statistics aren’t your thing, because by the end of this post, I put it in plain English. (OK, en-us.)

If you didn’t read her post, she looked at my GWO tests, which were all running neck and neck for two+ weeks, with a conversion rate of greater than 4% for the control (and the other ones, too). From there, she figured out that I can call it a day (i.e. they are a tie), when I have 1728 pageviews. I only had 783 views of the test page when I sent her the data.

Her answer assumes that I am looking for 95% confidence in my answer and a margin of error of plus or minus 1%. Since it only took 2+ weeks to get 783 views, I figured I only needed another 2+ weeks to go.

But at the same time that I wrote Wendi, I also wrote GWO. On the surface, their answer seemed to be very different from hers:

Given enough time, every test (assuming there are perceptible differences in the variations) will generate a winner in the report. This is because with enough data, even the smallest differences will be discernible. The question is, are those differences worth waiting for? At this point, there aren’t many conversions in your experiment. Because of the low traffic and low conversion rate, you may have to wait for months to get something more definitive.

Hmm, those two things didn’t seem to go together. So I pushed a little harder, and as usual, the GWO people were very responsive, and they came back with this answer:

What Wendi is describing in her blog is a power calculation. This
says: if I want to be able to measure a difference of a given size
(delta), if I wait so long (n), I will be 95% (alpha) certain that I
can see the difference…

My original statement is also correct: If you wait long enough, a
difference of any magnitude will be measurable. What Wendi shows is
that you qualify that statement with an amount of difference one is
interested in, you can calculate the number of impressions required to
detect that difference with a given degree of certainty.

So I pushed through the Greek letters (and wrote Wendi) in an effort to really understand her equation. Here is what it means in English - no Greek letters or subscripts (and Wendi, you correct me if I am wrong):

Given a conversion rate we already know (the control) and a confidence that we want (95%), how many views of the test page do we need to have in order to feel that the conversion rate of the other tests will be no more than plus or minus 1%? In the case of my test, how many pageviews do we need to see to feel 95% confident that the conversion rates of the other tests will be between 3.72 and 5.72%? (after all the control has 4.72%, so that’s plus or minus one percentage point, right?)

And in fact, GWO is right also - they *are* both right. We can decrease that “margin of error” (I wish we could call it “conversion rate difference”) to be .0001% and we will need over 17 million page views to have 95% confidence that there is a tie. Of course, I owe that calculation to Wendi’s spreadsheet.

And finally — look! I am starting to see a little spread in the data:

Certainly, you should have the navigation that works best for you. But testing navigation is not as easy as testing, say, what titles you should have on pages, or what prices you should offer your products at (Well, that one can be hard, too). Most companies want to decide on their navigation before they design their sites, and then they just live with their misery until the next redesign. (I learned that lesson the hard way.) So let’s just discuss the opportunities and downfalls.

Top horizontal vs. left vertical navigation vs. both.

Top horizontal navigation has the advantage of all being above the fold, and gets presented in a nice neat package up there with your logo. Furthermore, it doesn’t hoard much of your precious real estate, the way that left navigation does. After all, even if your left navigation only has seven or eight options, your designer will probably keep you from wrapping text around it (and thereby prevent you from using the white space below it. Although, you could use the space for surveys or testimonials or news or snippets from your blog.) Top horizontal has another advantage — you can add a blog much easier to your site. Blogs tend to have a side horizontal nav bar already. You could still do them on opposite sides of the page, especially if you don’t have to design for 800×600.

On the other hand, it is much harder to extend horizontal navigation - it can only get as wide as your customers’ browsers .

So I will make sweeping generalizations, if everyone who reads recognizes that the only “good” navigation is the one that is good for you. If you are a small lead generation website that wants to have Services, Products, Partners, About Us and Contact Us in your navigation (I really hate those, but more later), then go ahead and do the horizontal thing. If you are a large website, especially an e-commerce website with lots of products, you probably have to do the vertical navigation. If you are Amazon, you probably have so many products that you need to do both. And if you are a content site, like CNN (don’t you hate their newest redesign?) your whole site is really one big piece of navigation, because everywhere you turn, you are linking to another story.

Having said that, we are a small b-to-b website, and I just hate our horizontal navigation. I just wish I could extend it.

Text vs. words in pictures.

Oh, this one is easy. If your navigation includes important keywords, then do your navigation in text. That way, you get credit for those keywords in the search engines. On the other hand, if you have one of those Services - Products - Partners - About Us -Contact Us kinds of navigation, go ahead and write it any way you want. And you can always put your important links as end-links on the bottom of the page in real text, which will help your SEO some.

Javascript pulldowns and flyouts.

The issue here, besides any search engine issues, is about usability - it’s so hard to get your mouse to navigate to exactly the right place (and to then yet another layer of javascript. Think about your own experience: you mouse over something, a menu comes up, you move your mouse over to where you want to be, and then you have a third set, and you can’t get your mouse to hold on the right spot? You hate it, right? So keep this one simple. As part of that, make sure that the first level of navigation is mousable. For example, if you had a music website, and one category was Jazz, and under that, you had all sorts of jazz bands — you should still allow the visitor to click on Jazz, the highest level, so that s/he can see the category page.

What words should you use in your navigation?

This is a great opportunity for some quick user testing. Write down the topics of your top hundred or two hundred pages, and ask users to sort them into piles that make sense. Andthen ask the people who are sorting to give each pile a descriptive name.

My favorite example of bad naming is from the old Carnegie Mellon website. Here is a screenshot.

Notice that one of the categories is Faculty Visitors. I can’t tell you how many times I have been to that link. After all, when I go to the CMU website, I am usually pretending to be my spouse, dealing with benefits. Visiting their website. That made me a faculty visitor. Right? But always, I came away disappointed, because that’s where visitors from other universities were supposed to go….

You also have the opportunity to say just about nothing and use Services - Products - Partners - About Us -Contact Us, thereby ensuring that visitors cannot understand what your company does by reading your navigation.

Breadcrumbs, and where am I, anyway?

Not everything is on the navigation. After all, it just can’t be when you have a million-page website. But you still need to get visitors to their information, so you’ll have to rely on excellent on-site search, a great sitemap (but not everything will be there either, will it?), very strong scent, and linking from page to page.

Should you have breadcrumbs? You know, those little (sometimes clickable) links that showed you went from Outerwear to Sweatshirts to Hoodies? I think that the jury is out on that one.

Jared Spool claimed to me (this was in March ‘06 when I was at their road show) that his studies show, no one uses breadcrumbs. I countered that I use them all the time in Google AdWords, but that is more of a web application than a website (and I use them to click on and get back where I want to be. Plus, AW has a strong hierarchy, keywords inside adgroups inside campaigns, so where you are really matters.) If you do use breadcrumbs, be careful not to create a real trail in text (lest you really mess yourself up in the search engines.) You can create either a relative, “hard coded” trail (so, for example, even if I land directly on Hoodies from the search engines, my trail already says Outerwear > Sweatshirts > Hoodies.) Or, you can create a real trail, but wrap it in javascript so that the search engines can’t read it.

Endnotes: Many thanks to Internetrix, for being the only GAAC to submit to the GA contest. (I should have winner announcements this week.) Congrats to Conversion Rate Experts for becoming a Website Optimizer Authorized Consultant. (You guys are probably the only four page website to achieve that accolade.)  Thanks to Kevin from the T-shirt company, who requested this post. And many thanks to Taylor Pratt from LunaMetrics, whose vacation I interrupted just to ask an SEO question (and thereby finish this post. Finally.)

Why does conversion *rate* matter anyway?

All that seems to matter are conversions: How many sales you made, how many leads you gathered, how many people met their needs on your web site. So why (and when) does anyone care about the rate of conversion? After all, if the New York Times linked to your site, you’d have a lot of extra traffic, but it might not be well-qualified. All those extra visitors would increase the denominator of the conversion ratio, but there might only be a couple of extra sales. Your conversion rate would probably plummet during that time period — but you made extra money. So why care about rate instead of absolute conversions?

There are some specific (and very common) situations and mindsets that cause website owners to care about the conversion rate:

When you are paying by the click (e.g. Google AdWords). If you pay a dollar a click, for example, and you get 5000 clicks, that’s $5000. Let’s say your average order size is $25. If your conversion rate is 2%, that translates into 100 orders, or $2500. So you lost money on the deal — because your conversion rate is too low (and because you are paying too much for the click, when the average ticket is only twenty-five bucks.)

When you are working with affiliate marketing. There are probably affiliate marketers who charge by the click (see above.) But most of the affiliate deals we see are pay per action — you pay Shopzilla or Pricegrabber or whomever for the conversion or for the lead. So why care about rate — after all, you only pay when the customer converts! The problem arises when affiliates see lots of traffic going to your site, but not lots of money coming back to them. They aren’t happy, they will want to cut better deals with your competitors. Likewise, if you have a great conversion rate, they’ll want to do special favors for you.

When you are getting traffic from organic search. It’s true that the traffic is free, in the sense that you don’t have to pay for each click. But whether you pay an SEO firm or an internal employee, your are probably paying *someone*. That’s an investment, and you want the highest return you can get on that investment - so the higher your organic conversion rate, the higher your ROI.

When you are paying for online PR. You might get lucky and get a link from the NYTimes, or better yet, your story might get picked up by the blogosphere, then picked up by the mainstream media, and you’ll be on CNN by nightfall. Those are the stories we hear about. Most of the time, creating your own buzz is a lot of hard work. Time equals money, so you can apply the same logic here as we did to SEO: the higher the conversion rate, the higher the ROI.

In fact, you could reasonably argue that the only forms of traffic that are “free” are referring links - sites that link to yours because they like your site — and bookmarked or typed in traffic. The latter group is often repeat users, and depending on your product, should have one of the highest conversion rates of all your segments.

And that’s why everyone cares about conversion rate.

My post on the Google Analytics Documentation contest is my most read post of all time, not in small part because Techmeme linked to it. So why don’t I have more comments (especially since I have been begging my friends to submit.)

Well, Cynthia Closkey pointed out that I had accidentally required people to register in my efforts to figure out how to avoid pingback spam (not that one has anything to do with the other - this reminds me of a customer who set every cookie possible just to try to make GA work.) And then I never got rid of it, making it incredibly onerous to comment.

All right all right, I fixed it, and there are just a few more days to add your criticism of the GA documentation. Win real prizes. So that’s both fame AND fortune. Google sees every comment. Check it out. And don’t require your customers to register before buying or your readers to register before commenting. Assuming you want the comments and the money, of course.

Robbin

ps notice that I got my t-shirt